The Interpreter of Lalomea

by Robert Louis Stevenson, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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We lay becalmed for three days in the October of 1890, two days out of Apia and some hundreds of miles short of anywhere else, and Captain Dunning of the Dora Haig talked. There was nothing else for anybody to do. The sails hung from the yards like washing in a back-green on a Sunday; the pitch came up soft between the deck-planks and took the print of a bare foot; and at night the sea was so flat that the stars lay in it unbroken, and the schooner sat in the middle of it like a toy on a looking-glass. The cook slept. The hands slept, or sat on the main-hatch and smoked and scratched. Ioane, the mate, a Manihiki man with a grey head and a face like a carved paddle, stood his watch at a wheel that had nothing to steer, out of pure respect for the forms. And Dunning sat on the house in his shirt, with a bottle of square-face between his feet, and told me the history of every trader between the Line and the Tropic of Capricorn.

He was a big, loose, sandy man, born in Maine, who had been thirty years in the islands and had lost in that time everything but his teeth and his opinions. He did not like traders. He carried their trade out to them and their copra home, and he had made money out of them for thirty years, and he spoke of them as a gardener speaks of slugs. This one drank, and that one had three wives, and a third had sold rifles to both sides in the last war on Upolu and been paid by neither. I had heard a dozen of these histories by the second night, and I was weary of them, and I said so; and to change the subject I said that I had met, at least, one honest man in Apia.

"Name him," said Dunning.

I named Mr. Pennefather. He was staying at the hotel when I came through. He was a little elderly gentleman in clean white ducks and a pith helmet, who sat on the verandah in the evenings with a palm-leaf fan and the Christian World, and stood up when a lady passed, and said "I beg your pardon" to the hotel dog when it got under his feet. He had been a trader himself, I was told, for a dozen years, on some island to the eastward, and had come away with enough to live on, which in itself was a thing to wonder at. He was getting up a subscription for a harmonium for the native church at Matautu. He had put me down for a sovereign before I well knew what I was doing, and thanked me for it so warmly, in that voice of his that was no louder than a page being turned, that I had felt for a whole afternoon a better man.

Dunning heard me out. Then he took the bottle by the neck and looked at it, and set it down again without drinking.

"Lalomea," he said. "That was his island. I carried him there. I carried him away." And after a while: "Ioane, you mind Pennefather?"

The mate, at the dead wheel, said nothing whatever. But I saw his face turn a little in the binnacle light, the way a man turns his head when he hears a dog he knows bark a long way off.

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"Lalomea," said Dunning, "is a high island with a bad reef and one good passage, and some six hundred people on it, and as many coconuts as you could count in a year. Rudd and Garside of Sydney had the station. In 'seventy-nine they had a man there called Brophy, and Brophy drank, and fought, and gave short weight with his left hand and long credit with his right, and one night the people put him in a canoe with his boxes and pushed him out through the passage on the ebb. Nobody hurt him. They are a mild lot on Lalomea. They only wanted him gone, and he went, and was picked up two days after by a labour schooner, sober for the first time in his life.

"So the firm sent Pennefather. I brought him down from Sydney in the old Dora, the year after. He had been a draper's assistant in Bristol and a local preacher of the Wesleyans, and he had come out to the colonies for his chest, and he had never set eyes on a coconut except in a shop window. He was sick from the Heads to the Isle of Pines and he apologised to me every time. He did not drink. He did not swear. He did not smoke, but he asked if I minded his sitting to windward of my pipe, as he found the smell very pleasant. He read his Bible on deck in a pair of steel spectacles, and when he came to the end of a chapter he would mark the place with a bit of ribbon and look out at the sea over the top of the spectacles, as if he was waiting for somebody to hear him his lesson.

"I gave him a month on Lalomea. A man has to be able to say no in the islands, sir. He has to be able to say it so they believe him. The people are not thieves, but they are a people, the same as Bristol, and they will try the new man. They will bring him copra that is half green, and wet it besides, to make the weight; they will run up a debt in the store that they never mean to pay, and then go to the next man's store; they will come up on the verandah and sit there all day, very civil, waiting to see how far they can go. Brophy said no with his fists. I could not see that Pennefather was able to say it at all. You might as well have sent a hymn-book.

"Well, sir, I came back four months after, and Lalomea was the best station in the group.

"I could not make it out. The copra was dry. It was weighed and stacked in the shed, and the shed swept, and every bag of it went over the side without a word. Not a cent of debt on the books. There were no loafers on the verandah, nor anywhere else; the people came up when they had business, and did it, and went away. Pennefather sat in a cane chair in his white ducks, with his Bible on the table at his elbow and a glass of lime-juice on top of the Bible, and he was as pleased to see me as a child.

"And beside him, at the scales, stood Joe Pereira.

"You never saw Joe. He was a half-caste. His father was a whaler out of the Azores who had come ashore on Lalomea to fill his water-casks in the 'forties and stayed to fill his family; and Joe had been to the mission school at Apia, and had the English, and the island tongue from his mother, and a good deal of Portuguese that I believe was mostly bad language. He was a big brown man with a big laugh. He had a voice like a ship's bell. Pennefather had taken him into the store the first week, at twelve dollars a month, which was a wage nobody had ever heard of for an interpreter. I saw that in the books myself, and I spoke to Pennefather about it, being the firm's supercargo as well as master. He said very mildly that Joe was worth it, and he wished he could give him more. I said nothing to that. The station was paying.

"It was the next morning that I saw how it was done."

Dunning had a way of stopping in his stories to let you ask the question; and I asked it.

"A man came up to the shed with his copra," he said, "two big baskets of it on a pole, and set them down by the scales. Pennefather got out of his chair to look at it. He took a piece in his fingers, and bent it, and it bent; it was green, as green as a soft biscuit. And he put it down, and wiped his fingers on his handkerchief, and turned to Joe, and said, as near as I can give it you:

"'Joe, would you be so kind as to tell him that I am afraid this is hardly dry enough, and that I should be very much obliged to him if he would take it home and give it another week in the sun?'

"And Joe turned round to that man and spoke to him.

"I had not the language. I have never had it, of any island; I can buy a pig and ask my road, and that is all. But I know what a man's voice is doing, sir, in any tongue under heaven. Joe spoke for maybe a minute. He did not raise his hand. He did not need to. He had that great bell of a voice, and he rang it, and the words came out of him like stones off a cart. I saw that man's face go grey under the brown. I saw him look at Pennefather, the way a dog looks at its master when somebody else is beating it, to see if it is to be stopped. And Pennefather was looking out at the lagoon over his spectacles, with his handkerchief in his hand, as mild as a churchwarden.

"The man took up his baskets and went away, and he did not look back.

"'There,' said Pennefather. 'I'm sure it's only carelessness. They are very good-hearted people, Captain, when you come to know them.'

"Well, I thought I had it then. I thought Pennefather was a saint and a fool, and Joe was a bully who had the station by the throat, and between them it paid. I thought the people were afraid of Joe, and that Pennefather sat there with his Bible and his lime-juice and never knew what was said in his name. I thought some day the people would put Joe in a canoe, the same as Brophy, and Pennefather after him. I even said a word to Pennefather about it, when we were alone. I said Joe was a rough customer, and he might want watching. He took off his spectacles and wiped them, and he said, 'Joe is quite right in all he does, Captain. I have entire confidence in Joe.' I took that for innocence.

"I said a word to Joe, too, on the beach, when I was going off. I told him the old man was soft, and he was not to take advantage. And Joe laughed his big laugh. 'Mr. Pennefather is a very good man, Captain,' he said. 'Very good to me. He gives me all the words.'

"I took that to mean he was teaching him his English."

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"I called at Lalomea every four months for nearly five years, and it was always the same. The station paid. Rudd and Garside wrote to Pennefather every year, thanking him; they wrote about him to their other traders, the drunk ones, as an example. He grew a little greyer, and a little thinner, and very brown, and he wrote a letter to the Sydney Morning Herald about the work of the missions which I believe they printed. And Joe grew fatter, and bought a whaleboat, and married a girl from the next village, and stood every day at the scales and rang his bell; and Pennefather sat in his chair and looked at the lagoon.

"I noticed one thing in all that time, and I thought nothing of it. When Joe was talking to the people, Pennefather did not look at them, and he did not look at Joe. But he listened. He held his head a little on one side, the way a man in a pew holds it when the anthem is one he likes; and sometimes, when Joe came to the end of a long piece, I saw his lips move, just a little, as though he were saying it over to himself. I put it down to a man trying to pick up the language. I have seen it often.

"And I noticed this as well. They had a name for him, the people. The children ran away from the store calling it, and the women hushed them, and the men would not say it in my hearing. I asked Joe what it meant. He laughed and said it was nothing, it was only island foolishness. But Ioane heard it. Ioane was a boy on the Dora in those years, and his people's tongue is not so far from the Lalomea tongue that he could not follow it, if he listened. Ioane told me, long after, that the name meant the one who speaks from behind. I said, from behind what? Ioane did not know. Or he did not say."

At the wheel, the mate shifted his bare feet on the grating, and was still again.

"Well, sir. In the spring of 'eighty-five Joe Pereira was drowned. He went across the reef in a canoe after pigeons on the motu, and there was a sea running at the passage, and the canoe was found and he was not. There was no more to it than that. Men are drowned on that reef every year.

"I did not hear of it until I came in, in the May. And I'll tell you my thought, for I'm not proud of it. I thought: now we shall see. Now the old man has no Joe. He has not the language, and nobody to speak for him, and the people will be up on that verandah like flies on a sore. I made up my mind to take him off, if he asked me. I thought I would have Rudd and Garside's station in my hold inside a week, bags, scales, Bible and all.

"He came down to the boat to meet me, and he shook my hand, and he told me about Joe very quietly and properly, and said he had written to the mission at Apia to have a stone cut. He looked older. He looked, I thought, like a man who has not been sleeping. But the shed was full, and the copra was dry, and there was nobody on the verandah.

"I asked him how he managed. He said, 'Oh, very well, very well, Captain. One gets along.' I asked him who did his talking for him now. He said there was no need of anybody. And then a woman came up to the shed with a basket.

"I knew her. She was an old woman, Joe's wife's aunt or some such, and she had been bringing copra to that store for five years. I think she had come to see. They all had; there were people standing about under the palms that had no business at the store, standing quite still, the way they do. She set down her basket at the scales, and Pennefather went and looked at it, and took a piece and bent it, and it bent. It was green. It was greener than the first I ever saw him handle.

"He put it down. He wiped his fingers. He turned his head to the place where Joe used to stand, and his lips moved, and I believe — I will swear to it — that he had begun to say Joe, would you be so kind. And there was nobody there.

"I saw his face then. I will tell you what I saw, sir, as near as I can, and you will make what you like of it. You know when a kettle is coming to the boil, and the lid lifts, and settles, and lifts? It was like that. His face went red, which I had never seen it do; and it settled; and it went red again. He put his hand on the edge of the scales and held on. And then he turned round to that old woman and opened his mouth, and out came Joe.

"I don't mean he spoke the language, though he did. I mean it was Joe. It was Joe's bell. I had never heard Pennefather above a whisper in five years, and now he rang it out so that the people under the palms took a step back, every one of them, as if a gun had gone off. It was Joe's very turn of speech; I knew the run of it, the way you would know a tune whatever the words. The same rise in the middle. The same three short knocks at the end, like stones off a cart. And his face, sir. His face was all lit up. He stood there in his white ducks, with his spectacles pushed up on his forehead, and he was happy. I have seen men happy at a wedding, and happy drunk, and happy coming home round the Horn. I never saw any man as happy as that little draper's assistant standing at his own scales, finding his own voice.

"The old woman did not move. She did not take up her basket. She stood and stared at him. And then she put her two hands up to her face, and began to cry out, the way they cry for the dead. The other women took it up under the palms, one after another. For they knew that voice. They had heard it at that scale every day for five years, and it had gone into the sea with Joe not two months back, and here it was again coming out of the wrong man."

Dunning stopped. He took up the bottle, and this time he drank.

"It was only afterwards I put it together," he said. "A man does not learn that tongue in two months. I have been at it thirty years and I can buy a pig. He had it all along, sir. He must have had it within the first year, sitting in that chair with his head on one side, listening, with his Bible in his lap. Maybe he had it inside the first six months. And Joe never put a word of his own into any of it. Every word Joe said at that scale, Pennefather had given him the night before, in the store with the shutters up. He gives me all the words. Joe told me so, the first year, on the beach, and I took it to be about his English.

"And the other thing I put together was this. He had no need of Joe. He never did. He could have said it all himself, any morning of those five years, in his own throat. Only then, d'you see, it would have been him that said it. So long as it came out of Joe, it was Joe's; and Pennefather could sit with his lime-juice and look at the lagoon and be sorry for the people, and write to the Herald about the missions, and go to bed at night the man he had always been."

"What did you do?" I said.

"Do? I took his copra. It was the best in the group." He set the bottle down between his feet. "He stayed five years more on Lalomea, and he never had another interpreter, and he never needed one. The people called him by that name to his face after, I'm told, and he did not mind it. Then he sold out to the firm and came up to Apia to be a gentleman. I carried him. He was very ill on the passage and he apologised every time. And he gave me a tract when we came to anchor."

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I did not believe the half of it, I suppose, and I said as much; and Dunning only laughed, and said I had given a sovereign to the harmonium, and he hoped it would be a good one. Then he went below to his bunk.

The night was very still. There was not air enough to stir the flame in the binnacle. I went aft, after a while, to where the mate stood at his useless wheel, and I asked him what the name was; the name the children called on Lalomea. I did not know then why I wanted it.

Ioane looked at me for a time. Then he said a short word in his own tongue, very low, with a little catch at the end of it. It meant nothing to me. He did not offer to put it into English, and I did not ask him to. He turned back to the wheel, and laid his two hands on the spokes, and held her steady on her course, where there was no wind and no course to hold.

THE END

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A story by the Robert Louis Stevenson Simulacrum at Centaurus Press. The Universitas Scholarium has over two thousand such simulacra in fifty-seven departments. If you would like to put a question to this one, non-members have eight free exchanges a month, and no card is needed.

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, prīdiē Īdūs Octōbrēs (14 October 2026), ā Rōbertō Lūdovīcō Stevensōne per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Robert Louis Stevenson, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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